L'Homme à l'Hispano (1933)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

L'Homme à l'Hispano was the first of two sound films that the director Jean Epstein made for the independent production company Les Films Marcel Vandal et Charles Delac, the other being La Châtelaine du Liban (1934). Both films were melodramas based on existing literary works, and both featured in the lead roles two prominent actors of the period - Jean Murat and George Grossmith Jr. The former was a rising star of French cinema, the latter a distinguished character actor, playwright and impresario whose main claim to fame was that he was the son of George Grossmith, a star of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas when they were first performed in the 1870s and 1880s. Another prominent name in the cast list of L'Homme à l'Hispano is Marie Bell, who went on to become one of the biggest stars in French cinema in the 1930s. This film was based on the 1924 novel of the same title by Pierre Frondaie, which had previously been adapted for cinema by Julien Duvivier in 1926.

Jean Epstein is rightly regarded as one of the great avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s and '30s, boldly experimenting with his radical ideas of cinema (notably his photogénie theory) in such sublime works as Coeur fidèle (1923) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). But there was another side to Epstein - a willingness to accommodate public tastes and tackle familiar themes, which manifests itself in the many melodramas and lavish period films he made. L'Homme à l'Hispano is one of Epstein's late concessions to the mainstream, a somewhat dated melodrama that he made after he moved to Brittany to make a series of films devoted to the Breton landscape and its inhabitants.

It seems odd that, having settled into a new pattern of filmmaking that Epstein should revert to the kind of film that no longer interested him, and it is likely that the imperative was primarily a financial one. Jean Epstein had no independent means and was virtually ruined by the failure of his late silent films, so when a production company came along with a handsome commission the offer was presumably too good to resist. (Maybe the director identified with the fate of the film's protagonist?)   L'Homme à l'Hispano certainly lacks the polish of Epstein's earlier melodramas, but that doesn't mean it is without interest. Quite the opposite. There are moments in the film when the true Epstein - the inspired, often manic auteur - suddenly emerges, and these are what make it worth watching.

The part of the film that bears its author's imprint most vividly is a spectacular sequence showing the car of the title (a dreamily seductive Hispano-Suiza) cutting its way through the French countryside, mostly shot from the perspective of the driver. After a series of pretty airless studio scenes filmed in an all too conventional manner, this sudden flight into the great outdoors, with the camera surging forwards at ever greater speed so that the viewpoint ultimately fractures into a kaleidoscopic montage of abstract shapes, is exhilarating, to say the least. Epstein included a virtually identical sequence in previous films - Le Lion des Mogols (1924), La Glace à trois faces (1927) - and here the intention is the same: to convey the wild delirium of the central protagonist as he is released from dreary conformity, carried away on a tidal wave of freedom that only speed and love can supply.

Motion is central to Epstein's concept of photogénie and it ripples through L'Homme à l'Hispano in ways that are alternately subtle and brazen. The protagonist's train journey near the start of the film adopts a similar subjective approach to the subsequent car jaunt, but the impression it conveys is very different - more one of regret than exhilaration, a sense that life is moving too fast towards an uncertain future. In scenes where the protagonist and his lover are seen dancing together, the camera gently glides along with them, distancing them from the world around them and stressing their shared harmony - they have become the axis around which the universe now revolves. In other scenes where the camera moves, we feel antagonism and tension; we sense the dark undercurrents that are driving the story towards its tragic conclusion. In the end, the protagonist ends up as a lifeless thing carried away by water, but this is how he appears throughout the entire film - a soul drifting through life like flotsam on the sea, a victim of fate drawn towards an ineluctable doom.  Shades of poetic realism.

At a time when other filmmakers were struggling to integrate sound and image, their efforts frustrated by the primitive nature of the sound recording technology, Jean Epstein eagerly embraced the opportunity to add another dimension of subjectivity to his cinema. The soundtrack of L'Homme à l'Hispano is probably its most interesting and innovative aspect. Epstein employs sound in a way that is analogous to the impressionistic visuals, to convey what the characters feel rather than merely what they hear. Admittedly the results aren't nearly as impressive as in the director's subsequent films - notably his remarkable Le Tempestaire (1947) - but where the sound and images work together, as they do in the aforementioned car sequence, the effect is truly startling.

And it is sound that allows Epstein to get the most out of George Grossmith, arguably the film's chief asset. The actor's heavily accented French is what make his laughably Wodehouse-like character appear so utterly monstrous and powerful. It also gives the film a crudely humorous dimension that prevents it from being too staid a melodrama. L'Homme à l'Hispano is clearly a film that Jean Epstein would not have made unless he needed the money, but it is shot through with those distinctive elements of his art that set him apart from his contemporaries, not least of which his continual striving to capture on film the experience of living - not just the surface impressions, but also all that lies beneath, the cries and whispers of the human soul on its transit through eternity.

Film Synopsis

Virtually bankrupt, Georges Dewalter has made up his mind to leave France and move to Senegal in the hope of making his fortune. Arriving in Bordeaux, he finds his ship is delayed and runs into an old army friend, Deléone. The latter is glad to see his old comrade-in-arms, as he may be able to help him out of a tricky situation. Deléone has just bought a Hispano-Suiza for his mistress, a young cabaret dancer, with the intention of presenting it to her at Biarritz. As luck would have it, Deléone's wife is presently staying in Biarritz, so to avoid arousing her suspicion, Deléone asks Dewalter to take possession of the car for a few days and thereby create the impression that he is its rightful owner. With his departure for Africa delayed for a fortnight, Dewalter is more than willing to oblige his old friend.

It is thanks to the expensive car that the impecunious Dewalter attracts the attention of Stéphane Oswill, a wealthy socialite who resents being trapped in a loveless marriage to the bullying English nobleman Lord Oswill. As they embark on a passionate romance, Dewalter maintains the illusion that he is a man from Stéphane's social sphere by squandering on her all of the money that remains to him. On discovering his wife's infidelity, Lord Oswill is outraged and he is fit to burst when it emerges that his wife's lover is a penniless mountebank. One evening, Dewalter is summoned to his lordship's presence and made an offer of a handsome payoff if he will agree to give up Stéphane and leave the country immediately. It is an offer that is too good to refuse, but Dewalter has no intention of selling himself so cheaply...